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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24882937">your hand in my hand</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline'>TomBowline</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(I promise), (again sort of), (sort of), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Delirium, Dreams, First Kiss, Illnesses, Imminent Death, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, fragments and run-ons ahoy, imagining your own death, passing reference to A Dress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 00:22:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,052</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24882937</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>James knows that he will die. He knows it so well that he begins to see it, now, to glimpse a thousand different unmakings in the winding paths of his scattered thoughts.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>65</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. a dream</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>James’ mind wanders often these days. </p><p>Sometimes he will lurch awake from a haze of half-remembrance to see Francis’ concerned face peering over from beside him in the harnesses, gentling his name through the frozen air for what must not be the first time, always at low volume to avoid troubling the men. Sometimes his mind will drift from the latest facsimile command meeting up into the canvas and beyond into the cruelly open sky and touch down some minutes later, quite unable to say what they have been talking of. In recent days, he has had ample time alone with his thoughts in the bottom of a boat - his thoughts, his jelly wounds, his ground-glass joints, and his blurring vision. Still he will occasionally slip into a spiraling nothing of thought - starting with the working of a basic rigging knot, perhaps, then sliding towards single memorized words from his lieutenant’s exam, then towards the fine dress of a lady who passed him on the street once in Malta, then the costumes on Erebus - at which point he will be reminded of the warm pulse at his hairline and sink back into thoughtless pain. </p><p>This is like none of those occasions. On this night, <span>laid up in a tent with Francis kneeling at his side, </span>James’ mind is for once blessedly clear.</p><p>He does not make pretense to himself that Francis does not feature quite tenderly in many of his mind’s more coherent wanderings. He is, in fact, finding it increasingly difficult to make such pretense to Francis. Not when his hands cup James’ own so steadily, and sponge the caked sweat and blood from his raw face with such care. Not when his face is nearly all James sees when he can make himself understand what is before him - Francis’ face, windblown, sturdy, and so full of what James feels (does not trust himself to <em> think</em>, only to feel) must be some measure of anguished devotion. </p><p>When he grasps Francis’ hand and lifts it to his rough ruined mouth with all the strength in his good arm, he cannot find it in himself to steel himself against the tearing-away, the flashing shock, the frosty withdrawal that may result. He is laid open to Francis entire, whatever will come. He says Francis’ name as he grasps his hand, barely a whisper clawing up his dry throat, but loudly enough in the still and quiet tent that he hopes his intention will not be mistaken. James is no lonely sailor in the grip of delirium believing he sees an old sweetheart, simply a dying man who wishes that his feelings be made plain. <em> Kiss me, Hardy</em>. </p><p>Just as well that James has made no provision for rejection, for at the clumsy scrape of his lips on Francis’ palm Francis crumples atop him like a wrung rag and begins to shake silently, face against James’ neck and collar, hand moving upwards to stroke unbearably gently at James’ rough sunken cheek and the least fragile part of his hair. James moves his left hand with Herculean effort to rest on Francis’ forearm, thumb stroking tiny circles into the dirty linen of his sleeve and the chilled skin beneath. As James’ mind begins to drift, he hears Francis’ voice dimly from the juncture of his neck, feels his lips against his skin, murmuring like a prayer: “James. James. James.”</p><p> </p><p>• • •</p><p> </p><p>James knows that he will die. He knows it so well that he begins to see it, now, to glimpse a thousand different unmakings in the winding paths of his scattered thoughts. It brings him some small cowardly comfort — his work will be over, his worries will be gone. His pain will slip from him like so much teeth and hair, like an old coat that has grown too large. He sees Francis also, mourning him. Kissing his forehead. Stacking stones around his body. Sewing him up in sailcloth. Then leading the men on, unfaltering, without James. Without James to slow him down - a small bitter thought that James nevertheless knows to be truthful.</p><p>More fanciful: he sees himself rise and climb down into the firehole miles away. No more walking, just the ungainly shift onto his feet and then he is there in the shadow of their abandoned ships and free to step in, to sink through the rot of Sir John and the Netsilik man and eventually down, down into open sea. It will kill him: what cares he, dead and walking? The ice and his own body have killed him first. The freezing water is a salve, a merciful and fitting death for a failed sailor. </p><p>More fanciful still now, weaving into delirium after all, thoughts unspooling. He sees Francis dressed in full mourning, dabbing Lady Jane Franklin’s tears with a lacy handkerchief, two widows of the expedition: a farce, a low pantomime. He is not laughing. He cannot laugh. He sees himself laid out in a splendid coffin, rotting teeth concealed by a painted mouth, hair worked up as best it could be, gloved hands crossed elegantly over the bodice of Miss Cracroft’s best blue gown. A shroud of rough, stained, Navy-issue canvas, bearing in embroidery the exact likeness of the monogram he had hand-painted so lovingly onto his boots in another lifetime (he supposes it must have been part of his dowry, for Francis - or perhaps Francis sewed it himself - would have needed Jopson for such neat stitching - Jopson, who was that, what was the form of his face - perhaps he’s here somewhere amongst the mourners, if James could only remember his face), drapes from the edge of the coffin to cover the rest of him. James is relieved that none in attendance shall see his feet, their missing toes and blackened edges, so undainty. He is relieved that Francis lives to mourn him, to remember him as he was. He is relieved that Francis lives to have a life.</p><p>More selfish: he imagines himself and Francis the last men left alive. Failed utterly as captains, but done with the slow grinding labor of their failure. Free from the horrors of hunger and cold, from hauling the sick, from counting the dead. He imagines the two of them simply dropping down side by side in a tent one night, hand clasped in rough bleeding hand, and never awakening. He imagines the warmth bleeding between them, seeping out slowly, labored breaths becoming mercifully eased as life slips from them. He imagines real sleep coming for him for the first time in weeks and wrapping him in arms that feel like Francis’. </p><p>He lets his mind skate further across the implacable icy surface of time and imagines summer coming, a real Arctic summer as he’d read about in the accounts of explorers more successful than he. Lichens and wildflowers of the tundra growing impossibly out of the blasted shale, insistently eating through canvas, burrowing into their flesh. The animals he had only seen in drawings - foxes like little white dolls compared to the English variety, great caribou come up for the summer grazing, perhaps even gulls - oh, gulls, wheeling about the sky, strange perhaps in plumage yet always familiar, crying out in the language James knows and loves so well - picking at their flesh and the flora that blossom up from it. What a thing it would be to feed the land like that, so much more gently than so many of their men. How unfair it would be, but how wonderful. </p><p>He imagines being found. He imagines whomever the Admiralty sends at last, or Hudson’s Bay, trying to make sense of he and Francis. Scraps of Navy cloth, of sick-stained knitted wool, of gold rank braid clinging to them. Their half-stripped hands held fast, their legs entangled, their frozen faces pressed close against each other. <em> Together </em>, their bodies would scream to all who saw. Together as we were always at the end. Together as we should have been for longer. Together as we ought to be forever.</p><p>He does not imagine the footnote their end will be, the Tragic or Despicable that will be made of them. He refuses to conceive of the gawking and excuse-making that the oddity of their entangled forms will inspire. He imagines a blissful reality in which their bones are left undisturbed, not carried back to London or interred there on King William with All Due Dignity, apart, apart. He imagines them repaying the land together, their bones the only sort of monument that should come of expeditions like theirs. <em> Nothing beside remains. </em> He imagines nobody coming to see it. </p><p>He imagines the day they would finally be nothing but dust, insensate, devoid even of the secondhand pain that gore and corpse inspire. Most of all he imagines the impossibility of sifting through such dust and distinguishing from whom it came, Francis or himself. Together. </p><p> </p><p>• • •</p><p> </p><p>In the land of the living - the dying - in the half-lit tent, James feels Francis shift against him and hears the litany of his name travel up his throat and find the sharp ugly corner of his jaw. He spirals out suddenly and back to himself like a towline caught fast on its mark. They will not die together, he thinks suddenly, fiercely, ashamedly. They must not. Francis must live.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Yes, it has occurred to me that they would technically have seen an Arctic summer in the Whale Fish Islands, and presumably again in 1846 (although probably not on land). Indulge me.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. an awaking</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>James wakes slowly, as he often does these days. It takes time to haul himself out of the freezing gulf of memory that his dreams so frequently pull him into. He focuses, letting sensory details rush in to tell him where he is, and feels an odd sinking sensation all around him - soft and still and quiet. Warm. He takes in disorienting patterns on the walls, a mirror glinting moonlight in the corner, a solid weight to his right. He feels it even before he can form coherent thought - he is home. </p><p>Beside him, face slack against the pillow, Francis gives an abortive grumbling snore. Not so quiet, then, James thinks with a soft smile. He rolls over gingerly onto his right side and pulls Francis as close as he can, caring not whether he wakes him. He tucks his head into Francis’ neck and kisses him on the sleep-hot skin there as every inch of him floods with giddy relief. </p><p>Francis shifts, squirms, squints sidelong at James. “Hullo,” he whispers, still half-asleep. A small miracle in itself: Francis has spent too long snapping awake at the smallest provocation, all trained captain’s impulses demanding that he remedy whatever fresh disaster has reared its clamoring head and woken him. Now he is relaxed beside James in their bed, far from disaster and free from captaincy. Free to be but a man. Free to be here, with James, at home.</p><p>“‘Lo,” James returns with a wider grin than he ever shows to anyone but Francis, dark gaps of toothlessness on full display. “Happy to see you, Francis.”</p><p>“James,” Francis rumbles so tenderly, the particulars of his cadence shaping the short flat thoughtlessness of James’ name into something warm and familiar. “As’m I, ever.”</p><p>Something occurs to James then, something he feels a most indulgent need to clarify. He is never certain whether his dreams bring back imaginings or memories - even in the waking world it is sometimes a difficult distinction; the lead, he is told, will keep its claws in him far longer than the scurvy. “Back there,” he murmurs, reaching beneath the thick-piled blankets for Francis’ hand. “In the tents. At the end. Did I ever do this?” Slowly, he raises Francis’ dear rough hand to his face and presses a kiss, a true and strong kiss, to his open palm. </p><p>Francis‘ face splits into a sleepy grin, tinged just slightly with remembered grief. “That you did,” he whispers. “And do you remember what I did then?”</p><p>James raises one brow in a well-studied imitation of Francis, initially practiced to amuse them both, that he finds himself performing unconsciously more and more often. He feels it would spoil the moment somewhat to bring up the memory of Francis sobbing into his shoulder. “I’m afraid not.”</p><p>“Well then,” says Francis, head ducking down to share breath with James, “let me remind you.” </p><p>When their lips meet, the kiss is warm and soft and strong, and leaves room for no thought of their ever being apart.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I don't know what's happened to me. I hadn't written prose in foreverrrr, then I watched The Terror in lockdown (a singular experience - this show has everything! dying for the economy, disastrous hubris in leadership, constant uncertainty for the future, Tobias Menzies--) and the rest is, um. History. After a fashion.</p><p>The original idea for this fic came from "In a Week" by Hozier (so original, I know) and it, um, spiraled a bit from there. I was also sort of thinking of something I read (in an unrelated novel, and unsubstantiated as far as I can tell - sorry) about Scott's polar party, and Scott being found with an arm around Wilson (which it killed me not to reference, but as it happened about half a century later than this fic would have, not much I could do). I *did* reference the death of Lord Nelson since everyone else who writes about these two seems to love doing it. Also Ozymandias because I think about it SO much.</p><p>Edit 9/04/2020: de-anonymized!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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